America’s Competitors Angle for Silicon Valley’s Business | Hacker News Reader

America’s Competitors Angle for Silicon Valley’s Business

nytimes.com

30 pointssajid32 comments

Visa availability is not the magic ingredient to replicate Sillicon Valley. High wages and high concentration of talent are. What would entice an Indian or Eastern European developer to move to Mexico?

Beaches and a relaxed pace of life, not unlike that of the Balearic coast instead of aggressive dog eat dog of SV culture?

It is different but some people might like the more relaxed atmos.

What if the aggressive dog eat dog culture is what sparks innovation? What if having amazing beaches and hardly any need for cash is a recipe for underachievement?

People have options. If they choose the valley, they're choosing it for a reason. It's already easy enough to find remote work as a talented programmer and live wherever you want. If that's you priority, you do that.

If you want the competition and the buzz and the drive, you go where the people with those shared values are concentrated (NY or SF). Where you have to either bust your ass or risk ending up on the street like the people you see on Market every day. This propels you forward at a rate that is difficult to replicate elsewhere.

Interestingly, beaches are inversely correlated with economic activity.

See http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v527/n7577/full/nature1...

Optimal average temperature for economic activity is 13 C, San Francisco average is 14 C.

> Beaches and a relaxed pace of life

Dunno anyone from India who gets excited by the idea of beaches and relaxed pace of life. If anything then these places are ALL about relaxed pace of life.

Maybe to Eastern Europeans beaches might be enticing, but definitely not to the Indians.

You have obviously never been to India. The smell.

Not sure why people down vote. Read all about it here: https://www.aroundtheworldl.com/2013/10/27/smells-india/

I have thought about moving to South America and opening a startup there. I just don't know that there is sufficient talent to build up a team. We can't even fill our open positions in Southern California. I am curious, how many engineers from Silicon Valley would be interested in moving to South America? Mexico? Has anyone taken a poll?

If you become a remote company, this problem is solved. There's a HUGE pool of talent working remotely. Don't isolate your options to one narrow locale.

Good point. But I enjoy working with people in person, having stand-ups, etc. While I could see maybe 50-75% of the team working remotely, I would still want to have some local team members. I guess there is one way to find out: post some jobs and see if anyone bites.

I would actually love to move to South America or Mexico for a job at a startup.

However, it's probably a generational thing. I'm young and don't have roots in any particular area. Working on a different continent sounds like a wonderful adventure.

What part of that is important to the business and others?

A startup is an organization in search of a business. As such, frequently collaboration needs to be done in person. Actual businesses have an easier time with remote workers.

This. Collaboration is key for a startup and that's best done in person.

I've been considering a move down to Mexico for a while now (from NYC), or at least splitting my time between Brooklyn and DF.

I think you could make it work, particularly if you allowed people to work remote for part of the year. You could also rent a house for remote employees to come spend time at with the hope that they decide to move local. A startup I worked for earlier in my career rented a townhouse on South Park back in 2008 or so, which was convenient for any of us that worked remote to come be in SF for a week or two if we wanted.

Plus I'm sure there are plenty of very talented engineers local to any major city that you choose to start in. Pair that with accommodating international hires with remote work, housing, and intensive Spanish lessons and you'll probably be fine.

Many large multinational corporations have offices in Buenos Aires with IT workers. RedHat has a local office that offers support for the entire region, IBM has offices for subcontracted IT, etc. In fact it's just gotten expensive enough there (the country still has some inflation although it is slowing) that some jobs are being moved out (Exxon comes to mind) from BA to India.

Like anything the talent pool and their ability to speak English is on a spectrum but my personal experience hiring in-region was and is a positive one.

I think it would be tough to get people to move to South America or Mexico for a job like that because of the uncertainty around the position. If I move to NY for a job and the company folds or I get fired, I can crash on someone's couch for a couple weeks while I get a new job. I can't do that in Argentina, and I have no idea if I could get another job there in the first place.

I don't see highly skilled personnel being all that keen on moving to Mexico. Canada, however, already has a few areas that seem primed to attract new talent, particularly to cities like Vancouver.

Edit: I suppose Vancouver wasn't actually a great example. I just really like that area.

Vancouver has the high COL of the Bay Area with significantly lower wages. I don't see it becoming a major player.

I live in Vancouver, can confirm. Maybe after a significant liquidity event or two pumps some capital into the local ecosystem, but at present there are few (if any) world class tech companies here and despite the incredibly high and fast rising cost of living, wages are actually the lowest of any major Canadian city. Sure its a desirable place to live, but few world class talents are going to relocate here to work for second or third tier companies, for 50% less than they'd make in other markets, when a 30% more of their salary will be going to housing costs. Vancouver is a real-estate city, not a tech city and likely always will be.

I think there are a few like Arista Networks, Facebook and Amazon. You might make 80k+ and spend 15k on housing and the general cost of living is still lower than SF. Just yesterday I meant some SF based founders come visit because of tax credit incentives, lower labour costs, COL, etc.

With the relatively low wages in Vancouver, it seems strange that more companies aren't setting up offices here to take advantage of that.

This is all the more strange if the infographic at the end of this article is correct:

http://vancouversun.com/news/local-news/how-migration-wars-i...

ie. it appears that Vancouver and Toronto have very high quality tech talent but extremely low labour cost. I'm sure much of this is due to the exchange rate. But no matter the reason, it sounds like companies could find a competitive edge by setting up in Canada.

Vancouver is still significantly cheaper than the Bay Area, you can get a studio for less than 1000$USD / month.

This underlines an important distinction about Vancouver real estate: it's very expensive to purchase a home in Vancouver, but rents have not exploded at the same pace. That makes it a very different value proposition from what exists in the SFBA (especially for younger folks who don't necessarily want to buy).

A big gap between buying and renting is the classic indication of a speculative housing bubble. You may not want to buy a place in Vancouver right now.

Also it is in Canada. A huge draw of the Bay Area is its excellent weather. A huge detriment to living in Canada is its horrible weather.

Vancouver has pretty nice, mild weather. Summers in the 70s, winters in the 40s and 50s. Great for outdoors stuff that is nearby. It does drizzle quite a bit, but then so does Seattle, which attracts tech companies & workers just fine.

Canadian companies won't pay the salaries that companies in the US pay. Same for European companies. For that reason alone, I doubt we'll see a whole lot of competition in the tech space outside of the US.

Not to mention that these "highly skilled people" being referred to in the article don't really exist or aren't really affected by the H1B Visa issue. We're talking hordes of JS devs working for Infosys for relatively poor pay and the like. Not PHDs or whatever.

Canada, like anywhere in the West, is certainly an attractive place for people, so long as you land a good gig. Forget Vancouver. Montreal and Toronto are where it's at, but they need to cough up cash or people just aren't going to move there when they can move to Boston or SV or NY.

I was also annoyed at the mention of this new French Statue of Liberty for engineers/scientists initiative. It's just marketing and BS. I want to start a company, think they'll just take me? No. They'll only take the kind of people who are actually going to get a company funded, and those people are just going to move to where the money is: SV.

And furthermore, let's say that some technologists don't immigrate to the US anymore because of policies. GOOD. This helps the entire WORLD, instead of concentrating all the best people on Team America.

--edit--

Also Ottawa <3

Don't forget Ottawa!

I'm still undecided on the startup rule but it seems to me that it's still worth raising the minimum H1-B wage if it can increase the wage of the average american tech worker.

The notion of "good" or "bad" all depends on what you value. If you value the economy above all then this is good for companies outside the US, bad for companies inside the US. If you value jobs for your own citizens over money then opposite is true: better job opportunities for locals, bad news for corporations (at least in the short term).

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